Mark Cuban bans blogs. Lulz. So did China, Iran, and the army. And we know how well that went.

So is this just noise?

Actually, it's like an unwritten Kafka novel about authoritarianism: when Wal-Mart is more 2.0 than a self-proclaimed revolutionary who keeps investing in industrial value chains (hi, HDnet), no less, it's (troublingly) ironic - and a sign of all that's going wrong in the Valley and in the mediascape.

Couldn't agree more. When you don't invest in something strategic, your only option is to try "market", or in Cuban's case, "hype" your way to success. Another cable TV channel dedicated to men? Oh but wait, the picture is really, really clear. Genius.

You should actually look at what Mark said about this. I think the Dallas Morning news is having better PR about it. Seems to me that they're thinking that they're more important bloggers becasue they're old media.

I really think that Mark got it right on this one. His blog entries on it:

but the bulk is mark saying stuff like "a blog is a blog" and "my firm belief that newspapers having "bloggers" is easily one of the many bad decisions that newspapers have made over the past 10 years."

For a self-proclaimed revolutionary Mark Cuban is astoundingly myopic. This is even worse than his constant ranting about how YouTube is going to fail horribly... really soon... any day now... just you wait... (it's not).

His whole argument is founded on a faulty perception. A blog is NOT a blog is not a blog. What a horrendous mistake.

An old media blog is information reported from a first hand source, same as if it were printed, only the wording changes because blogs don't have defined standards.

So a blogger can pretty much include whatever they want? Well so can a Columnist.

If he is trying to imply that a lack of standards undermines the journalistic value of a blog, he is way off base.

Besides that, as anything published on an old media blog represents the parent company, I guarantee old media blogs DO have to adhere to certain standards (so it's not quite like the wild west out there). It's a littler looser, but really not by much.

What gets me is he even admits to understanding that there is essentially zero difference between what can be written in a feature piece vs what can be written in a blog.

It's content, that's all, a blog is just a form of delivery.

And though he uses it as part of his argument, his real issue doesn't seem to be with concerns regarding standards. Its with people who write "feature" (print or television) pieces, vs people who write pieces via blogs and peripheral channels, which he contends makes them not "feature" pieces, and in his eyes, no different from any other random person on the internet.

The faulty assumption there is that blogs are somehow peripheral, when they have never been more mainstream.

I would argue that someone has to report the news initially (first hand), and there is nothing that says blogs can't break news, and their only relegated to speculating after the fact... so if reporter A's company is no different from thousands of others, why should he have to sit outside the locker room because he publishes his story electronically? That's the real question, which Mark Cuban has utterly and completely failed to answer.